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Wednesday, December 5, 2001

Out Cold

Teen comedy? Snowboarding flick? Out Cold’s better at putting extreme winter sports on the screen than tickling the funny bone — or telling a story.

The humor attempted up on Bull Mountain (“tucked in the cleavage” of an Alaskan range, according to our creepy but lovable narrator, Stumpy) occasionally snickers its way out of the high-school bathroom and into the frat house. The butts of the jokes are tits, ass, alcohol, grass and the balding nerd who’s inherited the slopes, Ted Muntz (Willie Garson).

Ted’s dearly departed dad, Poppa Muntz, is the dubious legend of the town. His more-or-less slacker employees — Rick (Jason London), Jenny (A.J. Cook), Luke (Zach Galifianakis), Luke’s brother Pig Pen (Derek Hamilton) and Anthony (Flex Alexander) — pay tribute to him every year by re-creating his notorious “Moon Run.” They drop trousers showing the trap doors of their long johns and race, mugs of beer in hand, down the powder on their boards to become king (or queen) of the mountain. Dirty tricks are encouraged. The first one to reach the bottom with the most beer and slap the mooning behind of Poppa Muntz’s statue wins.

Warning guys: If you’re coming for T&A, that’s the only booty you’ll see. Out Cold evidently takes its PG-13 rating seriously. Watching 1997 Playboy Playmate of the year, Victoria Silvstedt, woodenly play an immature male’s sexual fantasy (Inga, the Swiss snow bunny) is like getting your hands on your older brother’s girlie mag just to find the best pages somehow stuck together: Out Cold keeps her award-winning charms out of sight.

Miss Silvstedt’s bra isn’t the only thing overstuffed in this movie. Novice directors Brendan and Emmett Malloy jam-pack Out Cold with knockoffs of all the usual suspects of these kind of comedies. Their equally greenhorn screenwriter, Jon Zack, rips off Casablanca and a much more talented team of brothers, the Farrellys, in a lame attempt to spice up the plot’s bland and muddled love triangle.

“They haven’t quite got it figured out, but they’re getting a little warmer,” Out Cold’s tagline admits. It almost describes the Malloys and Zack: They haven’t figured out the formula for a successful teen comedy; they’re still out in the cold.